In a Linux shell how can I process each line of a multiline string?

Question

While in a Linux shell I have a string which has the following contents:

cat
dog
bird

and I want to pass each item as an argument to another fu

Answer 1

Use xargs:

Depending on what you want to do with each line, it could be as simple as:

xargs -n1 func < file

or more complicated using:

cat file | xargs -n1 -I{} func {}